Network fees on Robinhood's layer-2 fell from $6.04 million on September 4 to $234,819 twelve days later, according to DeFiLlama. Over the same stretch the value held in applications on the chain rose about 15% to a high for the series, and fees have edged back up since the low.
Robinhood Chain collected $312,597 in network fees on September 18, about 95% below the $6.04 million it took on September 4, according to DeFiLlama data retrieved on September 19. The low came two days earlier, at $234,819 on September 16, roughly 96% below the peak.
CoinDesk reported the decline on Friday, putting the fall at 97% using figures from the analytics provider growthepie, whose series shows a higher early-September peak of roughly $8 million a day. The two providers are close on the recent low. growthepie's figure of about $230,000 for September 16 sits within 2% of DeFiLlama's $234,819. They differ on the peak, which makes the percentage sensitive to which provider is counting.
The traffic did not leave with the money. CoinDesk, citing growthepie, reported 13.1 million daily transactions at the early-September peak against 8.9 million in mid-September, a 32% fall set against the 97% fall in fees, with the average cost of a transaction dropping from 64 cents to 2.6 cents. Those two changes reproduce the headline number between them: 68% of the transactions at about 4% of the price is about 3% of the revenue. The transaction counts could not be checked here, because growthepie's data was not reachable when this article was prepared, so they rest on CoinDesk's reporting rather than on a second source.
The peak it fell from was itself brief. DeFiLlama has the chain collecting $105,348 on August 25, $1.07 million on August 30, $3.75 million on September 1 and $6.04 million on September 4 before the decline began. Against that peak the fall reads as near-total. Against August 25, the chain is still collecting about three times as much as it did before the spike started.
DeFiLlama's fee series does not stop at the mid-September low. It records $307,973 on September 17 and $312,597 on September 18, about 33% above the September 16 figure and level with each other. Two days is not a trend, but the fall has at least paused.
The applications running on the chain lost less than the chain did. Fees collected by all protocols on Robinhood Chain fell from $25.1 million on September 4 to $6.96 million on September 18, a decline of about 72%, against about 95% for the network itself. Trading volume across the chain's decentralized exchanges was $12.44 billion over the seven days to September 19, down about 20% week over week. Uniswap's v3 and v4 deployments accounted for $1.21 billion of the $1.50 billion traded in the most recent day.
Pons, the token launchpad behind much of the chain's activity in early September, has traced the same shape. Its daily revenue peaked at $2.06 million on September 5 and fell to $368,737 on September 16. DeFiLlama's weekly totals drop from $10.7 million in the week to September 9 to $5.98 million in the week to September 16, a fall of 44%. Since the low it has settled between roughly $448,000 and $473,000 a day.
One series moved the other way. DeFiLlama puts Robinhood Chain's total value locked at $966.9 million on September 18, a high for the series and about 15% above the $838.0 million recorded on September 4, the day fees peaked. The assets parked in applications on the chain grew while the revenue from moving them collapsed.
Robinhood Chain has been live since the summer and hosts, among other things, a perpetuals protocol built by the dYdX Labs team with Robinhood Crypto. It is part of the tokenization argument Vlad Tenev put to analysts after crypto trading revenue fell 47% in the first quarter, when he asked to be judged on tokenization rather than on trading volumes. Applications on the chain earned $2.7 million in a single day on August 30, according to CoinDesk, which at the time put it ahead of Ethereum and behind only Solana.
Cheap blockspace carrying steady usage is what a layer-2 is built to produce, and the September figures fit that description about as well as they fit a retreat. Separating the two requires knowing how many transactions the chain has processed since September 16, and DeFiLlama's fee series does not carry transaction counts.
